Here is what I had to do. Kill all my opened Finders. Open the Terminal and type the command:
$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
Metacharacter | Meaning |
Iteration | |
? | The ? (question mark) matches the preceding character 0 or 1 times only, for example, colou?r will find both color (0 times) and colour (1 time). |
* | The * (asterisk or star) matches the preceding character 0 or more times, for example, tre* will find tree (2 times) and tread (1 time) and trough (0 times). |
+ | The + (plus) matches the previous character 1 or more times, for example, tre+ will find tree (2 times) and tread (1 time) but not trough (0 times). |
{n} | Matches the preceding character, or character range, n times exactly, for example, to find a local phone number we could use [0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4} which would find any number of the form 123-4567. Note: The - (dash) in this case, because it is outside the square brackets, is a literal. Value is enclosed in braces (curly brackets). |
{n,m} | Matches the preceding character at least n times but not more than m times, for example, 'ba{2,3}b' will find 'baab' and 'baaab' but NOT 'bab' or 'baaaab'. Values are enclosed in braces (curly brackets). |
Brackets, | Ranges and Negation |
[ ] | Match anything inside the square brackets for ONE character position once and only once, for example, [12] means match the target to 1 and if that does not match then match the target to 2 while [0123456789] means match to any character in the range 0 to 9. |
- | The - (dash) inside square brackets is the 'range separator' and allows us to define a range, in our example above of [0123456789] we could rewrite it as [0-9]. You can define more than one range inside a list, for example, [0-9A-C] means check for 0 to 9 and A to C (but not a to c). NOTE: To test for - inside brackets (as a literal) it must come first or last, that is, [-0-9] will test for - and 0 to 9. |
^ | The ^ (circumflex or caret) inside square brackets negates the expression (we will see an alternate use for the circumflex/caret outside square brackets later), for example, [^Ff] means anything except upper or lower case F and [^a-z] means everything except lower case a to z. NOTE: Spaces, or in this case the lack of them, between ranges are very important. |
Positioning | |
^ | The ^ (circumflex or caret) outside square brackets means look only at the beginning of the target string, for example, ^Win will not find Windows in STRING1 but ^Moz will find Mozilla. |
$ | The $ (dollar) means look only at the end of the target string, for example, fox$ will find a match in 'silver fox' since it appears at the end of the string but not in 'the fox jumped over the moon'. |
. | The . (period) means any character(s) in this position, for example, ton. will find tons, tone and tonneau but not wanton because it has no following character. |
More... | |
() | The ( (open parenthesis) and ) (close parenthesis) may be used to group (or bind) parts of our search expression together. |
| | The | (vertical bar or pipe) is called alternation in techspeak and means find the left hand OR right values, for example, gr(a|e)y will find 'gray' or 'grey'. |
Characters | |
---|---|
x | The character x |
\\ | The backslash character |
\0 n | The character with octal value 0 n (0 <= n <= 7) |
\0 nn | The character with octal value 0 nn (0 <= n <= 7) |
\0 mnn | The character with octal value 0 mnn (0 <= m <= 3, 0 <= n <= 7) |
\x hh | The character with hexadecimal value 0x hh |
\u hhhh | The character with hexadecimal value 0x hhhh |
\t | The tab character ('\u0009' ) |
\n | The newline (line feed) character ('\u000A' ) |
\r | The carriage-return character ('\u000D' ) |
\f | The form-feed character ('\u000C' ) |
\a | The alert (bell) character ('\u0007' ) |
\e | The escape character ('\u001B' ) |
\c x | The control character corresponding to x |
Predefined Character Classes | |
---|---|
. | Any character (may or may not match line terminators) |
\d | A digit: [0-9] |
\D | A non-digit: [^0-9] |
\s | A whitespace character: [ \t\n\x0B\f\r] |
\S | A non-whitespace character: [^\s] |
\w | A word character: [a-zA-Z_0-9] |
\W | A non-word character: [^\w] |